12/06/2004 @ 7:28AM

There's A New Grid In Town

Now that computer systems are bigger and more complex than ever before, industry titan
William
Coleman
William Coleman
figures, it is time they learned how to run themselves.

“We’re heading for self-configuration” of computer systems, says Coleman, founder of
BEA Systems
, who left that company last year to start Cassatt, a software company aiming to steer that self-configuration. “With the commoditization of the computing world, we have to automate information technology operations.” Cassatt is backed by Warburg Pincus with a reported $50 million investment.

Cassatt has been in stealth for over a year, while attracting senior development executives from
Sun Microsystems
,
Oracle
and
Novell
, as well as the former chief information officer of the U.S. federal government. Today, Cassatt will announce its first product, software for automated management of large systems of computer servers and applications. Coleman says the software will be able dynamically allocate previously dedicated servers to different tasks as needed through so-called “virtualization” of servers, fixing problems on the fly and only telling their human managers about it afterward.

The software costs about $25,000 for the controlling software, and $1,500 per server managed. Thus, a system of 30 servers would cost $70,000 — $25,000 for the brain and $45,000 for the individual managers.

Coleman faces big competition in the market: Besides Sun,
Hewlett Packard
offers its Openview software for system management.
IBM
, which has been pushing its own “On Demand” software, is said to be a Cassatt partner.

Coleman says that the current push among customers for lower prices and open systems pushed IBM to him. “If they could yet spend more money and make things more and more complicated” they would, he says, but “IBM has to adapt to this — the world won’t go in for On Demand to cost more money and tie it to a single vendor.”

Both HP and IBM, Coleman says, “aren’t competing with us, they are competing with where technology and the economy are going. They have to adapt — we can help them get there.”

The company says it has about 40 customers, including
Informatica
,
Ascential Software
and a program for the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as a large pharmaceutical manufacturer. If things go as planned, a new version of the product, incorporating more sophisticated virtualization techniques to turn many computers into a single giant grid, will be announced in the spring.

Coleman says Cassatt marks the start of a fourth ten-year cycle in computer technology. The previous ones include exploration of the capabilities of the semiconductor, resulting in the personal computer; their growth into client-server networks; and the maturation of that into the Internet and Web services architectures.

In each case, both the capabilities and the geography of electronic intelligence grew vastly larger. In the new era, says Coleman, “the footprint is the globe, always connected — the productivity enhancements will surpass everything we’ve seen before.”